i am ben afflick

i got my accelerometer eval (RD3112MMA7260Q) in the mail today . woo. i also got my tini eval as well as my printserver. whoa. quite a day for the mailman.

i ran the demos to make sure it worked. it's pretty neat, but the demos or horrible.

i thought it best to put it in an enclosure considering that it is an esd device. i bought a 2x3x1 radioshack enclosure a few days ago and just hoped that it would fit. it didn't. it needed to be 2x3x1.25. that'd meant fun with the dremel. my styrene supply is already allocated for the breast pump motor so i used a chunk of hobby hardwood. it turned out pretty well. my dremel skills are improving.

so i am all ready to start writing my own code and what do i find... or what do i not find.. the source code to the demos. what the hell? stupid fucking idiots. there is no reason to not release the code.

i figured that anything talking over serial to a microcontroller was going to be trivial and i was right. i little bit of serial port logging and i got the info i needed. * R E V E R S E E N G I N E E R E ' D * . ha! next, i modified the old classic gl gears demo and bam..

http://z425.com/gears_accelerometer.asf

this is sampling at 30ms with 10 frames of smoothing.

there is a gimbal lock after 180 going on and i can't decide if all my stupid by hand quadrant conversions are the problem or if there really is a singularity. i'll post the source in a few days once it is cleaned up.

being that this is very cool and in a way works better than i had thought, still i'm not happy with the resolution. those tricky bitches kinda hid their numbers. after you get down to it, there is only 16 values per quadrant. that's pathetic. i could make a ring bubble that pathetic. ha! i wonder if it is just the eval a/d setup being lame. it's an 8bit converter, but it is wasting most of the range. i'll play with it more and see what i can find. or.. maybe i should try something from analog.com rather than the MMA7260Q.